A conventional example of a procedure for making a management decision in such packaging plant will now be described with reference to FIG. 13.
One of the major elements in making a management decision in a packaging plant is the packaging cost. A trial calculation of this packaging cost is made, as shown in FIG. 13, by multiplying the uniformly rated standard packaging cost, which covers a series ranging from standard quadrangular chips easy to package to QFD and connectors of peculiar shape difficult to package, by the number of parts to be packaged.
An investigation of the capacity for production of packaging boards in a certain packaging line is made by dividing the product of the standard packaging cycle and the total number of parts to be packaged, by the machine standard packaging capacity. This standard packaging cycle is set uniformly for all dissimilar types of parts to be packaged. The machine standard packaging capacity uniformly specifies the packaging capacity, which naturally may vary according to parts to be packaged and machine productivity with respect to the degree of difficulty in packaging.
An investigation of a line arrangement is made solely by a rule of thumb worked out by the managerial class employees working at a job site in a plant, on the basis of production information about the arrangement and number of parts and necessary production capacity concerning boards to be produced and machine characteristic information about the machine parts-associated capacity and the machine standard packaging capacity.
An investigation of the arrangement of packaging boards is made pursuant to the conventional method. Specifically, if conventional products adopt the insertion method, this method is employed as such, and if they adopt the surface packaging method, this method is employed as such. Thus, under the present situation, the determination of a packaging method employed has not been based on general assessment of all elements involved in production, such as the parts cost, packaging cost, control cost, and quality.
Therefore, the arrangement in said conventional example has been confronted with a problem that the accuracy of calculation is poor in that all parts are calculated on the basis of the same standard packaging cost.
Further, since all parts are calculated using the same standard packaging cycle, there is a problem that the accuracy of calculation is poor.
Further, since the line arrangement is investigated by the instinct and experience of managerial class employees working at a job site, there is a problem that the resulting line arrangement is not necessarily optimum.
Further, since all elements involved in production are not subjected to general assessment, there is a problem that the selected method is not necessarily optimum, nor are the produced boards.